— Two former Amazon executives who helped build Discovery’s direct-to-consumer operation in Bellevue, Wash., are stepping down from their leadership roles following the company’s acquisition by Paramount Skydance. They will remain in advisory roles during the transition.

Avi Saxena joined Discovery in 2019 as chief technology officer of its direct-to-consumer business and led its new Bellevue office. He became CTO of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) following Discovery’s 2022 merger with AT&T’s WarnerMedia business. Paramount Skydance completed its acquisition of WBD on Oct. 6, with the combined company taking the name Skydance Corporation.

Before joining Discovery, Saxena was with Amazon for 19 years over two stints, most recently as vice president of technology for Amazon Marketplace. He also held leadership roles at Microsoft and internet infrastructure startups.

Tyler Whitworth is stepping down as executive vice president and chief product officer for WBD’s streaming business. He led teams working on digital products for HBO Max, discovery+, Eurosport, TNT Sports, Food Network and others. Before joining Discovery, he spent more than seven years at Amazon, leading teams developing products and services for customers and third-party sellers.

Dane Glasgow, Skydance’s chief product officer, announced the departures of Whitworth, Saxena and WBD Chief Information Officer Dave Duvall in a memo shared with GeekWire.

“Much of the strength of WBD’s product and technology organizations reflects their leadership and dedication. Please join me in thanking them and wishing them the very best,” Glasgow wrote.

The company has not responded to GeekWire’s inquiries about the future of the Bellevue office.

— Bahadir Onalan is returning to Microsoft as a vice president in its CoreAI organization, focused on responsible AI, after nearly 10 years at Amazon. Onalan first joined Microsoft in 2005 and worked on Azure teams focused on search, analytics, business intelligence and security. He left in 2017 as a principal software group engineering manager to join Amazon, where he worked on machine learning initiatives.

“This second tenure feels like a true homecoming,” Onalan wrote. “Our goal goes beyond shipping a platform or a product; we are here to define the global standards for AI safety.”

— Naria Santa Lucia is leaving Microsoft after seven years, most recently as a general manager with Microsoft Elevate. She previously served as executive director of the Washington State Opportunity Scholarship.

“I’ll carry the lessons I learned from my time at Microsoft as I continue my personal and professional mission to serve people and communities by teaching, advising nonprofits and mission driven organizations, and spreading joy and human connection,” Santa Lucia wrote.

She did not announce a specific next role.

— VertueLab, a Pacific Northwest nonprofit supporting climate tech entrepreneurs, has named Leo Ochoa executive director, promoting him from managing director for Oregon. He succeeds Aina Abiodun, who is transitioning to chair of the organization’s board after more than three years as executive director.

“Leo brings a unique blend of vision, relationships, and entrepreneurship experience,” the organization said, noting his background as a wildland firefighter, startup founder and patent holder for wearable safety gear.

Abiodun’s accomplishments include co-creating the Seattle Climate Innovation Hub, launching the Opalene Climate Challenge and helping lead the Just Future Climate Labs initiative.

— Seattle’s Pulse Space has appointed Leah Sardone as vice president of engineering. The startup is developing laser-based systems to deliver power and enable long-distance communications in low Earth orbit and beyond. In July, the company announced a $40 million U.S. Space Force contract to advance its laser-based space power technology.

Sardone brings more than 23 years of experience in hardware, sensors and embedded systems development. She joins Pulse Space from IonQ, where she most recently served as director of quantum networking and interconnects. Her previous employers include Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Honeywell Aerospace, Blue Origin and Amazon’s Project Kuiper, now known as Amazon Leo.

— Caravel Bio a Portland, Ore., startup developing technology to rapidly test newly designed proteins, has announced Michał Jastrzębski as its CTO. The company says its platform can screen millions of protein designs in parallel at low cost, helping identify promising candidates for applications in human health, pollution reduction and industrial processes.

Caravel also announced a nearly $1.25 million Small Business Innovation Research Phase II grant from the National Science Foundation to further develop the platform.

Jastrzębski previously served as a principal machine learning engineer at Ginkgo Bioworks. His past employers also include GitHub and Intel.

— Darick Baker has been appointed the director the University of Washington’s Washington Nanofabrication Facility, which the UW describes as “the largest publicly accessible nanofabrication facility and cleanroom in the Pacific Northwest.” Baker joined the facility in 2012 as a research engineer and has served as acting director since 2025. He previously worked at the Colorado School of Mines

— Technology Alliance announced that Stoke Space director of communications Kyra Jorgensen has joined its board. Jorgeson recently joined the space startup from the fusion company Helion Energy.

Richard Wang, co-founder and former CEO of coding bootcamp Coding Dojo, is launching Idea to Launch, a 30-day program that helps would-be founders turn a startup idea into a working product using AI coding tools and hands-on engineering help.

Nearly four years after selling Coding Dojo to Perdoceo for $70 million, Wang was looking for a way to keep doing work that had a measurable impact on people’s lives. He found it in mentoring aspiring founders.

Wang thinks AI is about to do for software what smartphones did for video. Cheap cameras and cloud platforms gave rise to the influencer economy, and he believes AI will push the cost of building a product close to zero.

“We’re going to create this whole new builder economy that’s about to come in the next three to five years,” he said. “Baby boomers are gifted with cheap housing. I think Gen Z is going to be gifted with a cheap price to build.”

He sees plenty of demand. Citing a Shopify-Gallup study and a Zapier/Harris poll, Idea to Launch says 60% of Americans have a business idea but only 9% launch one. Wang said the reasons people hold back include fear of failure, not knowing how to get started, and not wanting to give up a paycheck or benefits.

Unlike accelerators such as Techstars or Y Combinator, Idea to Launch doesn’t take equity, and participants don’t have to quit their jobs. Over 10 evening sessions, founders get coaching, run customer interviews, build a product with AI tools such as Lovable, Replit and Cursor, and plan a launch. Each founder also gets 10 hours of one-on-one help from professional engineers.

Wang said people without technical backgrounds can now vibe-code 80% to 90% of a product on their own. The hard part, he said, is connecting it to other services, setting up the database correctly and making it secure.

“We’ll provide that type of knowledge with real engineering support,” he said. For engineers who have never done customer discovery or marketing, the program fills in the business side.

Security researchers have found serious vulnerabilities in apps built on vibe-coding platforms. A 2025 scan found 170 of 1,645 apps built with Lovable exposing user data, and another case this year exposed nearly 19,000 user records. Wang said the program’s engineers will make sure security holes are fixed “before they launch or before they get onto the first customer.”

The first cohort starts Jan. 11, followed by three more through April. Each is capped at 15 to 20 founders. Tuition is $3,500 for the inaugural cohort, down from the normal $5,000. Sessions will be held in person in Seattle or Bellevue, and Wang said he expects to pick a space within the next month. He is self-funding the venture.

Wang, who immigrated from China at 13 and was the first in his family to attend college, became Coding Dojo’s CEO in 2015. He left in 2017 for Trupanion and returned in 2019. The company grew to $50 million in peak annual revenue, according to Wang, and had 194 employees at the time of the sale, according to GeekWire’s earlier reporting. It operated campuses in several states before shifting online during the pandemic.

Wang sees Idea to Launch expanding to other tech hubs, then online, and eventually licensing the program globally, much as Coding Dojo grew to multiple campuses. If the first cohorts go well, he can envision a follow-up program, Launch to Traction, to help founders find more customers.

He doesn’t plan to invest in participants’ companies. Having spent years building and selling Coding Dojo, Wang said he knows how hard that road is and would rather “cheer them on from the sidelines.” He said taking VC money at Coding Dojo created pressure to grow 100% a year, something he calls “startup steroids.”

For Wang, the point isn’t to find the next unicorn. It’s to give more people a shot at building something now that AI has made it cheaper and easier.

“I think everyone should try at least once just to bring their idea to reality,” he said.

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Next-generation battery materials startup Group14 Technologies today announced $169 million in new funding and plans to build a manufacturing facility in Spain, expanding a production network that includes Washington state and South Korea.

“In order to be a global player in a global industry, we need a global footprint, which means it’s not about picking one specific region and going all in,” Group14 CEO Rick Luebbe told GeekWire. “We really need to grow all regions.”

The startup has developed a silicon-carbon material that replaces graphite in lithium-ion battery anodes, enabling higher energy density and faster charging, according to the company. The material already ships primarily to consumer-electronics customers, while the company pursues automotive and data center applications, Luebbe said.

The funding came from a European investor, Luebbe said, but he did not name the firm. It extends the company’s $463 million Series D round and brings Group14’s total funding to nearly $1.5 billion.

The new facility will be located in Sagunto, near Valencia, with production targeted for mid-2029. Luebbe said the site offers clean energy, skilled labor from the chemical industry and proximity to automotive customers, given that Spain is the second-largest vehicle producer in Europe after Germany.

Group14 already has a presence on the continent, acquiring Germany’s Schmid Silicon Technology Holding GmbH in 2023 to secure a European source of silane gas, a key ingredient in its battery material.

Just as the U.S. has been working to bolster its domestic battery manufacturing and reduce its reliance on Chinese supplies, Europe is doing the same, Luebbe said. The company wants to be part of that solution and is eager to make its move.

“Building chemical plants takes a long time, and so you’ve got to think ahead and be able to establish that global footprint and development strategy,” Luebbe said. “We’ve learned a lot in the lifetime of Group14.”

Group14 was founded in 2015 and six years later began operating its first commercial-scale factory, called Battery Active Materials-1, or BAM-1, at its headquarters in Woodinville, Wash.

In 2023, it broke ground on BAM-2 in central Washington’s Moses Lake with funding that included $100 million from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The site has two modules that at full capacity will be able to produce up to 4,000 tons of silicon-carbon battery material annually, enough for at least 200,000 electric vehicles.

The company originally aimed to start production by late 2024, a target later pushed to early 2026. Group14 laid off an undisclosed number of Washington workers in July 2025 and furloughed additional employees at Moses Lake in January as it shifted resources toward South Korea. The company’s total headcount is approximately 383 employees.

Luebbe said this week that the company is now targeting mid-2027 to bring the first module online, following equipment installation and commissioning. The second module does not yet have a firm completion date.

“It’s a very complicated infrastructure, and it takes a lot longer than we had anticipated to do the final installation and commissioning,” he added.

The company has at least secured the power it needs. It previously contracted sufficient clean energy to run the site, as well as a planned silane gas facility. Since Group14 began its development, data center deployments have accelerated in the region and projects are competing for clean electricity from hydropower dams.

While BAM-2 has been delayed, Group14’s BAM-3 site in South Korea — which originally began as a joint venture with SK materials — has been producing anode material since 2024. The facility has been scaling up and expects to reach its 2,000-ton annual capacity within about six months, Luebbe said.

Group14 is shipping primarily to consumer-electronics customers, which qualify new materials faster than automakers. Luebbe also sees a growing opportunity in data-center battery backup units, where silicon-anode batteries could help smooth rapid spikes in AI-server power demand.

“I’m anticipating data center batteries, battery backup units, to be the second biggest market for us behind EVs,” he said.

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The cloud security startup raised a Series C at a $3.8B valuation, instead of selling itself for the same price.

Seattle startup Ganaz, which provides payroll and HR tech for agricultural workers and employers, has been acquired by Beacon Holdings.

Ganaz co-founder and CEO Hannah Freeman announced the deal Wednesday on LinkedIn, saying the public benefit corporation “is in great hands” at Beacon, which “is building momentum for our next exciting season.”

Freeman indicated she is stepping away from the company to “catch my breath, spend more time with my daughter, and dream about what’s next,” she wrote. “I’ll miss our team & customers, but will be cheering you on from the sidelines.”

Ganaz launched in 2017 and has raised more than $10 million, with its last disclosed funding round in June 2021. That financing valued the company at $26 million, according to PitchBook. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Beacon, based in Toronto, buys software businesses serving traditional industries and provides shared technology and operational resources. The company said in September that its portfolio included 45 software businesses.

Ganaz’s platform provides employee onboarding, training, communication and analytics tools. It also offers a Mastercard payroll card that gives unbanked workers access to digital banking. Employers save time and money by skipping paper checks, while workers keep more of their pay by avoiding check-cashing and high remittance fees.

Ganaz received GeekWire’s 2023 Geeks Give Back Award. “We founded Ganaz to make life better for farm workers, and we do that by building technology that agricultural employers love and can’t live without,” Freeman told GeekWire in 2023. “We build our tools to help both workers and employers prosper, and that kicks off a virtuous cycle that helps agricultural communities prosper as well.”

At that time, the startup was serving more than 250,000 agricultural workers in the U.S. and Mexico and 100 employers in the sector.

The company has about 17 employees, according to LinkedIn. Freeman did not say in her post whether Ganaz will continue as a subsidiary or whether its employees will receive job offers from Beacon. GeekWire has reached out to Freeman for comment and will update the story with any reply.

The PHP scare may have faded from your feed, but the cleanup is far from over. Last week, two critical bugs in the open source language behind roughly 70% of websites left organizations scrambling to fix their systems, with some taking sites offline until the vulnerabilities could be patched. According to researchers who found the […]

The patents behind PicoBrew, the Seattle startup that once promised to do for home beer what Keurig did for coffee, are up for sale again — six years after the company collapsed into receivership and after two changes of ownership.

Hilco Global, an Illinois-based diversified financial services company, announced this week that its Intellectual Property Services group has been retained by PicoBrew’s current owner to market the startup’s technology to potential buyers.

The sale includes 17 patents and patent applications, two of them pending, along with engineering and design files and product concepts. Buyers can bid on all or part of the portfolio, and non-binding indications of interest are due Nov. 18. Hilco is pitching the assets to companies in coffee, tea, kombucha, spirits, beverage appliances and housewares.

The seller is Pico Craft Group, which Hilco described as led by a former PicoBrew investor. After PicoBrew’s 2020 collapse, its bridge lender took over the assets. That lender, PB Funding Group, was managed by former Microsoft software developer Greg Whitten, The Seattle Times reported at the time. Pico Craft Group bought the assets from the lender in 2024 for an undisclosed amount, according to Hilco, which did not say who runs the group.

“PicoBrew was a true innovator in the consumer and commercial craft beverage space, and its portfolio has applications well beyond beer,” Eric Hurwitz, a senior director at Hilco, said in a news release.

The portfolio covers technology from PicoBrew’s full product line, according to the release, including the Pico Pro and Pico C home brewing appliances, the PicoStill accessory for spirits, the Pico U Multibrew platform for beer, coffee, tea and kombucha, and Z-Series brewing machines and KegSmarts kegerators for commercial use.

Bill Mitchell, a former Microsoft vice president and longtime homebrewer, founded PicoBrew in 2010 with his brother Jim Mitchell, a food scientist, and Avi Geiger, an engineer who also worked at Microsoft. Their countertop machines automated the brewing process using PicoPaks, ingredient packs based on recipes from craft breweries.

The startup became a Kickstarter regular. Its 2017 campaign for the Pico Model C raised $1.93 million from 4,301 backers, a record at the time in the site’s food category, and the $549 machine landed at retailers including Best Buy, Williams-Sonoma and Amazon. A 2018 campaign for the Pico U pushed PicoBrew into coffee, tea and kombucha.

But the company struggled to land more funding. In February 2020, after failing to close a new round, PicoBrew entered receivership. It had raised more than $15 million and cut its staff to fewer than 40, down from a peak of more than 80.

PicoBrew ceased operations in 2020, and no one has supported existing devices since, according to Hilco. Any decision about future support would be up to a buyer. The King County Superior Court approved the 2020 sale, which freed PicoBrew’s bridge lender from the company’s liabilities and from responsibility to past customers, The Seattle Times previously reported.

Some owners kept their machines brewing without the company’s servers by using a workaround developed by a Facebook group of PicoBrew users, The Spoon reported in 2020. The founders were let go after the receivership, according to the site.

When PicoBrew went up for sale in 2020, Mitchell told GeekWire that hardware takes time and multiple funding rounds backed by firm investor commitment.

He shared advice he’d gotten from Dan Leviton of Maveron: “Startups only fail for one of two reasons — they run out of heart, or they run out of money.”

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— Xbox Chief Operating Officer Helen Chiang has suddenly left Microsoft after 21 years with the company, just months after landing the role in July. Her past roles include leading Mojang and the Minecraft franchise.

Verge first reported the news on Friday, citing a memo from Xbox CEO Asha Sharma that did not disclose the reason for her departure.

An Xbox spokesperson was likewise mum on details. “We don’t discuss individual personnel matters. We’re grateful for Helen’s years of service and wish her well,” the company said in an email to GeekWire.

Xbox has undergone a massive reorganization that included Chiang’s appointment, roughly 3,200 job cuts through the fiscal year — about 20% of the Xbox workforce — the spinoff of four game studios and a plan to dramatically flatten management.

— Seattle-based tech leader Philip Su has joined Anthropic as a member of technical staff on beneficial deployments. The management role focuses on AI applications in global health, life sciences, economic mobility and education.

Su started his tech career with 12 years at Microsoft and later worked for Facebook. He has launched multiple ventures, including Audere, a global health software nonprofit, and Superphonic, a podcast player. In 2021, he worked at an Amazon fulfillment center to experience the holiday rush.

Su also created and leads an annual course for University of Washington computer science students on how to maximize their personal and professional growth.

— More leadership changes are underway at SeekOut, a Bellevue-based recruiting startup launched in 2017. The company announced Monday that co-founder John Tippett is now president, moving from his role as chief client officer.

In April, SeekOut CEO and co-founder Anoop Gupta retired and passed the reins to enterprise software veteran Sean Thompson. In August, co-founder and chief technology officer Aravind Bala took over as CEO. Thompson is now listed as an adviser to the board.

Tippett will lead day-to-day operations and work with Bala “on the company’s direction,” according to a press release. SeekOut said it wants to integrate AI tools into customers’ operations to reduce recruiters’ workload.

SeekOut is No. 68 on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

— Fred Hutch Cancer Center has appointed Michael (Mick) Merritt as vice president of strategy and partnerships, effective Dec. 7.

Merritt joins from Penn Medicine, where he was chief operating officer of Penn Signature Services. He has more than 25 years of experience in academic medicine, consulting, strategy, business development and operations.

— Industrial wastewater treatment startup Membrion has named Alexander Demihovsky as director of applications engineering. He joins the Seattle-based company from Xylem. His past employers include Evoqua Water Technologies and Bechtel National.

“Alex helps turn customer needs into viable project plans, mitigate execution risks and develop competitive proposals,” the company said.

Membrion is No. 160 on the GeekWire 200.

— Marine geothermal energy startup Endurance Energy has named Marty Calvert as the director of turbomachinery. Calvert joins the Seattle startup from Blue Origin. He was previously a turbomachinery engineer at NASA for more than 13 years.

Endurance completed its fifth deployment to the ocean floor last month, testing Adélie, a 100-kilowatt geothermal generator named for a penguin.

— Lattice Semiconductor, a Hillsboro, Ore.-based company, has added two directors to its board:

• Raejeanne Skillern, former VP and chief marketing officer of Amazon Web Services, who returns to Lattice after serving on the board from 2022 to 2024
• John McCool, senior vice president and special adviser to the CEO at Arista Networks

The deal, expected to close sometime next year, is to help bring AI agents to work alongside humans to underwrite, analyze, and price decisions.

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Disruptive has made headlines in recent years for pouring money into companies like chip startup Groq and the AI voice-generation startup ElevenLabs.

Seattle-based Kivo Health today announced $10 million in funding to help increase access to its services, which target older adults with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The Series A round brings the startup’s total funding to more than $16 million.

Kivo ships equipment to patients’ homes and provides a nine-week program of therapist-led, live video sessions focused on exercise, breathing techniques and disease management. The company provides ongoing support following the program and says it uses AI to handle administrative tasks and communicate with patients, supporting its clinicians.

“We’re using the funding to build our AI health coach to blend AI-led care with human-led care,” Dr. Victor Sadauskas, Kivo’s co-founder and CEO, said via email. That pairing, he added, will help patients manage their chronic disease over the long term.

The company has approximately 50 employees, including clinicians.

COPD is an incurable lung disease in which damaged airways and air sacs make breathing difficult and can worsen over time. Common symptoms include shortness of breath, a persistent cough and fatigue. COPD is the third leading cause of death globally and the fifth in the U.S.

However, there are effective treatments to improve the condition, though many patients are not able to easily access care. A study of Medicare beneficiaries with COPD found that only 3.7% received pulmonary rehabilitation in 2012.

Kivo reports that a peer-reviewed study of its program found improvements in participants’ symptoms, physical function and mental health. The company also funded an analysis that estimated its model could reduce annual health care spending by $8,245 per member through fewer hospitalizations, ER visits and time in nursing homes.

Kivo says its program is covered by Medicare, Medicaid and private insurers including UnitedHealthcare, Humana, Blue Cross, Aetna and Priority Health.

“By thoughtfully combining high quality clinical care with AI, we can now scale proactive, accessible care to every senior, improving symptoms and reducing avoidable costs,” Sadauskas said in a statement.

Sadauskas launched Kivo in 2023 with co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Vaughn Koch. Sadauskas previously was an emergency medicine physician for Kaiser Permanente and a senior investment fellow with Life Science Angels. Koch is a serial entrepreneur who sold his startup Movity to Trulia in 2010.

While its current focus is COPD, Kivo aims to expand into other costly chronic conditions affecting older adults.

Allumia Ventures led the round, with participation from Corewell Health Ventures, Y Combinator, Heuristic Capital and MassMutual Ventures.

Avante, the maker of an AI platform to help companies manage employee health care and other benefits, has landed a $30 million Series A round.

Frist Cressey Ventures led the round, with participation from Sorenson Capital, Hearst Ventures, Morgan Stanley Next Level Fund and existing investor Fuse. The new funding, announced Tuesday, brings Seattle-based Avante’s total raised to $40 million, following a $10 million seed round led by Fuse in 2024.

Benefits are one of employers’ biggest costs. Avante’s AI agents do work like comparing vendor contracts against actual claims, reviewing plan documents for errors and preparing for renewals. Employees can also use the platform to ask questions about their own coverage.

The startup plans to use the cash to expand internationally and develop more AI agents, building on a beta release of its “Ava Agents” last week.

Avante says it now has more than 70 customers, including Samsung Semiconductor, Real Chemistry, Zscaler and News Corp, and that bookings grew nearly fivefold over the past year. The platform reaches more than 385,000 employees and family members, according to the company.

Avante was founded in 2023 by CEO Rohan D’Souza; Carly Eckert, a physician and epidemiologist who serves as head of innovation and impact; and executive chairman Kabir Shahani, the co-CEO of Amperity.

D’Souza and Eckert previously worked as executives at health care automation company Olive AI, which shut down in 2023. The startup emerged from stealth in early 2024 and launched publicly in April 2025.

“Benefits teams are responsible for one of the largest and most consequential investments their companies make, yet they’re still operating with outdated information, archaic spreadsheets, and technology built for another era,” D’Souza said in a statement.

Avante is pitching its software as employers face rising health care costs. Large employers are projecting a median 9.2% increase for 2027, the company said.

The startup competes with benefits and HR software providers such as Workday, ADP, Deel and Rippling. It has also signed partnerships with benefits advisory firms including Gallagher, OneDigital, Segal Benz, Howden and USI Insurance Services.

Avante ranks No. 156 on the GeekWire 200, our list of top Pacific Northwest tech startups.

Rohit Patel is departing Meta after eight years working on AI evaluations and reinforcement learning, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. His startup, Ndoc, aims to take on Microsoft Office Suite.